This blog provides a commentary on landslide events occurring worldwide, including the landslides themselves, latest research, and conferences and meetings.The blog is written on a personal basis by Dave Petley, who is the Wilson Professor of Hazard and Risk in the Department of Geography at Durham University in the United Kingdom.

This blog is a personal project that does not seek to represent Durham University.

Friday, 10 September 2010

Ruapehu lahar information

One of the many highlights of the splendid IAEG Congress in Auckland this week was a talk by GNS geologist Chris Massey on the 18th March 2007 lahar at Mount Ruapehu on North Island. The lahar occurred as a result of the failure of a tephra wall holding back the crater lake at the summit, and is shown by this NASA image:

The potential for a lahar had been anticipated and the site was intensively monitored with real time instruments such as water level sensors and geophones; with two web cams; and with periodic surveys using a terrestrial laser scanner. An emergency plan was in place and worked well. The need for caution was undeniable - on 24th December 1954 a lahar from the same site demolished a railway bridge at Tangiwai, killing 151 people on a train that tried to cross a bridge that had been destroyed by the lahar.

The event has been written up in a paper (Massey et al. 2010), and there is a spectacular set of images of the event captured by the web cam available here (NB it took me a while to get my eye into these images).

An interesting aspect of this event is that one can examine just how good the natural hazard science community is at assessing hazard. There is a New Zealand Civil Defence report, written in 2002, about the threat of a lahar at Ruapehu online here.

Hunza Landslide monitoring site

About Me

My book:

Smith and Petley (2009): Environmental Hazards - Assessing risk and reducing disaster is my new book - the 5th edition of this best selling text. The book is a highly accessible, undergraduate level text that provides an introduction to the natural, social and technological events that combine to cause disasters. It draws on the latest research findings to guide the reader from common problems, theories and policies to explore practical, real-world situations. In writing it we aimed to capture both the complexity and the dynamism of environmental hazards.

New Masters Programmes in Risk

My department is offering a new Masters (MA and MSc) programme in Risk, including an MSc in Risk and Environmental Hazards. Find out about it by clicking on the image above.